Getting Started

Installation

Automatic

Lighthouse is available via PyPI, installation is as easy as:

pip install lighthouse

Note that when installed this way the example files found in the source repo are not included. If you wish to use the examples, a manual install via the current source tarball is your best choice.

Manual

First download the current tarball at lighthouse-1.0.0.tar.gz, then:

tar -zxvf lighthouse-1.0.0.tar.gz
cd lighthouse-1.0.0
python setup.py install

Prerequisites

Python verison: Lighthouse runs on python versions 2.6 and greater, but is better vetted on 2.7 and 3.4 specifically. Versions 2.6 and PyPy are included in the test suite but are less rigorously tested manually.

Required libraries: By default the lighthouse installation depends on

  • Watchdog for monitoring changes to config files
  • PyYAML to parse the config files
  • Kazoo to communicate with Zookeeper
  • Six to maintain python 2 and 3 compatibility

HAProxy: As of right now only HAProxy version 1.4 or higher, 1.3 might work but is untested.

Platforms: Lighthouse is most extensively tested on Linux and Mac OSX but should run just fine on any Unix-y/POSIX platform. Native windows use is unsupported as UNIX sockets are required to control the load balancer, but a setup with cygwin is theoretically possible.

Optional Extras

Redis plugins

Lighthouse includes a “redis” extra package that comes with a health check for redis services. To install an extra, use square brackets when installing lighthouse:

pip install lighthouse[redis]

Examples

At this point you should be ready to run the examples if you’ve downloaded them. Simply run the start.sh script for the target example and then run lighthouse-writer and lighthouse-reporter passing in the path to the example directory. For more details on the included examples see Examples.

Configuration

The next step will of course be customizing your own Configuration.